we'll have to rachet up the barbarity of our extermination methods to ensure that we continue to receive justice through capital punishment.

That is why We The People execute men and women, isn't it? So "justice" can be done? Justice for the victims. For their heartbroken and grieving loved ones. For society in general, which so reveres life, and views murder as such an abomination that we kill to prove it.

It's about getting even, yes?

Or at least trying to get even. We know that nothing really evens the score;

nothing can bring a murder victim back from the dead; nothing can make society whole.

So, in the name of justice, we choose two minuses instead of one. We create a second set of heartbroken, grieving loved ones. We respond to the shortcomings of our culture - the mental illness, drug addiction, pathological alienation, rage, ignorance, childhood abuse or DNA - by stopping its heart and shutting its mouth, forever.

Which brings us back to Massie and McVeigh.

How can We The People try to get even with killers who want us to execute them? How can we exact justice from men who won't fight to the very end to stay alive? What satisfaction can possibly be gained from such willing participants?

It's not enough that Massie - who was executed at San Quentin Prison on Tuesday - and McVeigh - who will die in Indiana on May 16 - waived their right to all appeals. They've added insult to injury by rejecting (and deriding) outside attempts to spare their lives.

Massie, a two-time killer on Death Row for 30 years, even tried to make it easier for prison guards to insert the intravenous needles that would carry his chemical ticket to oblivion: He pumped his fist to enlarge his veins.

Massie went exactly as he wanted to go, with exactly the attitude he'd carried since his first murder in 1965; he was unremorseful, unapologetic and unrepentant.

Where's the justice? Where's the getting even?

The man not only didn't beg for his life, he said dying was far preferable to spending the rest of his days in prison. If we really wanted to make his worst nightmare come true, we would have refused to kill him.

But then, popular wisdom tells us, we would have robbed his victims' families of the one thing they are all after, that elusive reward we call "closure." In a country that kills in the name of justice for We The People, you apparently can't get closure unless somebody else dies.

Of course, the truth is, closure never really comes - as hundreds of murder victims' families will sadly tell you. Their loved ones will never not be dead.

They will never not be heartbroken about it. There is no "normal" to get back to.

For a few hours or days, after they watch their son's or mother's or wife's murderer die, some people feel better. But later on, when the media no longer come to call and there is nothing left to witness, the anger and desire for vengeance turn out not to have abated. The instinct is to keep feeding them.

Inside, nothing has changed; there's just the cold, hard reality of what has been lost.

If we are to be the only nation in the developed world that equates justice with executions - if we insist on perpetuating the myth that a form of state- sanctioned punishment can fit the crime of a sociopath - then we should put down our needles and silent poisons. We should look to the experts, the people who don't buy the good news of the New Testament, but resonate to its vengeful eye-for-an-eye prologue.

Because we cannot kill a killer more than once (no matter how many lives he may have taken), we ought to do the closest thing: kill him as brutally, mercilessly and bloodily as we know how.